"I thought it was just a flu that wouldn't go away."

In just a couple of weeks, Julia went from being an energetic, active student studying to become an engineer to sitting in a hospital room receiving a blood cancer diagnosis. To survive, her doctors needed to find a matching stem cell donor.

It was during the autumn term that Julia Forster started to feel unwell. Her energy was gone, and her runs grew shorter and shorter.

"I thought it was just a flu that wouldn’t go away," she says.

One morning, when she fainted on her way to the subway, she ended up in an ambulance to Danderyd Hospital instead of going to her lecture at KTH. The test results showed acute myeloid leukemia, blood cancer.

Julia doesn’t really remember how she reacted, other than that it was a shock. When the doctors told her she would need a stem cell transplant to survive, the shock was replaced by anxiety.

- Without a transplant, I had no chance of getting well. My brother was tested since there is about a 25 percent chance that siblings match, but unfortunately he didn’t, Julia explains.

I wasn’t ready to die, I want to get married and start a family.

When no matching stem cell donor was found within the family, the hope was to find an unrelated donor in one of the world’s registries. While the doctors were searching for a match, Julia received chemotherapy.

- The cancer was so serious that I could have died from it, but I tried to keep my hopes up as best I could. I wasn’t ready to die; I want to get married and start a family.

The doctors were clear that the transplant needed to happen as soon as possible, and as the days passed without a match being found, Julia decided to speak openly about her situation – hoping to get more people to join the Tobias Registry.

At Christmas 2024, an article was published in Aftonbladet with the headline Julia, 24, needs a stem cell donor to survive which had an enormous impact.

In just a few days, thousands of new donors registered with the Tobias Registry after reading her story.

After a few months, Julia received the news she had been waiting for: a suitable match had been found for her and she was able to receive new, healthy stem cells. Today, she is back to studying full-time again.

Julia's struggle has not only changed her own life – it has also increased the chances for others to receive a life-saving stem cell transplant.